There are many different ways to make money with a content website. Here are 5 of the most common that we have found our clients to have the greatest success with.
- Subscriptions & Courses
- Ecommerce Sales
- Advertising
- Affiliate Marketing
- Events & Donations
Subscription and Course Content
Charging access to premium content is one of the most profitable ways you can build a sustainable online business.
Selling your expertise is the life blood of a membership website. Membership platforms that offer hosting and a membership site framework are designed to allow a new or seasoned business owner to set up a profitable subscription site without coding or technical knowledge.
To create a successful subscription website, you need to be able to separate public and member content, manage member’s personal data and process recurring payments. These functions need to be on auto-pilot so you don’t have to send invoices, check for payments, and field endless customer service inquiries.
SubHub’s platform has been built to handle all aspects of running a subscription website with member-only content, membership tiers, and automatically recurring revenue for you via Stripe and PayPal.
Ecommerce Sales
Selling products from your website can also be very profitable, especially if you have the flexibility to offer digital and physical products.
Most content sites have the potential to make good revenue from selling ebooks, reports, white papers, research, podcasts and other downloadable products. Many also sell physical goods that they either stock and ship themselves, or they just take the orders for a third party merchant to fulfil.
On the SubHub platform, for example, you can easily sell physical products with variations (for example a T-Shirt in 3 sizes), or a digital product like a downloadable PDF or e-book. You can even sell a piece of content on your website as a ‘pay-per-view’ option.
Advertising
Instead of promoting your site through advertising that you pay for, you can sell advertising and reap the profits yourself.
If you have a following and a large number of members who regularly visit your site, you may be able to sell your own advertising or site sponsorships to other members or relevant suppliers. For example, let's say your membership site is a financial advisory. Your members and visitors may be interested in other related products that you could advertise on your site, such as books about financial strategies, talking to kids about saving money, or even subscriptions to other related services.
On the other hand, if you don't want to sell space on your site, you can sign up to an ad network such as Google Adsense, integrate ads into your site and earn money based on clicks or impressions.
Affiliate Marketing
There are a couple of ways to look at the concept of affiliate marketing.
- You can sign up with a company as an affiliate. You would then place links on your website. When a site visitor clicks on the link, they are redirected to a third-party website. If a purchase is made, you get a commission on the sale. This strategy can work well, but may not be ideal for membership content behind your paywall. Your paying members may not appreciate you making extra money from affiliate links.
- Another way to utilize affiliate marketing is to encourage your own members to be affiliates for your program. Your members in essence become "ambassadors" for your website, and you pay them a commission whenever their outreach results in a sale. As your team of ambassadors grows, you are likely to generate more and more affiliate income.
Events and Donations
Holding online or live events offer many advantages to the membership website manager, in addition to the revenue gained by ticket sales.
Events work to bring members together, and they allow you as the manager to offer premium content at a premium price. A 3-day live retreat is a much higher-ticket item than an online webinar. Other examples include tele-summits, group calls, even one-on-one coaching online. You can sell individual tickets to these events via e-commerce, or make them available as part of a subscription.
Allowing donations can be a viable means of generating revenue if your website caters to an association or non-profit group.
The SubHub platform makes any of these options easy to set up. If you aren’t sure, simply contact our friendly support team.
To maximize the money you can make from your content website you should have multiple revenue streams. SubHub makes it easy for you to generate income from advertising, affiliate marketing, ecommerce, subscription and event promotion.
Get started with a free 14-day SubHub trial today.
